Content Formula - Cadbury Intranet Site Case Study

Keeping your content fresh: websites, online marketing, communications and intranets

Cadbury Intranet Site

Global Commercial Gateway logo Cadbury, one of the largest confectionery companies in the world, have just re-launched their intranet site for marketers and sales staff. We have been involved with all aspects of the launch, including strategy, design, build and content gathering and writing. We are now helping with the daily management of the site. This case study looks at how we went about launching one of our biggest intranet successes yet.

The Brief

Global Commercial Gateway

Cadbury approached Content Formula asking for help with their Global Commercial Gateway intranet site, aimed at sales and marketing staff working in the Gum, Chocolate and Candy categories across the globe.
The existing intranet was unloved and had suffered from neglect by both readers and contributors.
Following a recent re-organisation towards a more global structure at Cadbury, there was a strong need to rethink the intranet and relaunch it.
The new intranet needed to provide more news about marketing activities around the world; it needed to enable better knowledge sharing; and it needed to provide a platform so that global and regional teams could promote strategy, research and resources to the teams around the world.
Furthermore, Cadbury’s intranet infrastructure was in the process of being upgraded to Microsoft Sharepoint, providing a good catalyst for change.

The Execution

The key to a successful intranet is planning and engagement with business stakeholders, not just the sponsor. We held a number of discovery meetings at all levels in the company in order to map business objectives to information needs. It was important to be inclusive – whilst some of the meetings were held face-to-face in the UK, we also spoke to many stakeholders in different time zones over the phone.
The output from this was a formal document for each of the Categories and other global business units. This document, which we call Communications Objectives, acts as a strategic footprint for the intranet and governs all decisions made on content, structure and even design. Most crucially, the communications objectives also lay down the plans for how the intranet site will be kept fresh and relevant once it is launched.
Following this, we set about creating a site structure and wireframes. Our studio then worked up graphical designs and the site skeleton was built.
Gathering content is always the toughest part of any intranet project and underlines why good planning is essential. Armed with our communications objectives and lists of the key players and subject matter experts across the organisation, we contacted these people and requested their input. Much of the content was provided as PowerPoint or Word documents. Our job was to gather these documents, organise them, edit them and make them “intranet-friendly” by publishing them with suitable titles, summaries and metadata, so that end users did not feel that their intranet was just a mass of folders and file downloads.
In those cases where existing content was not available, we interviewed subject matter experts and wrote suitable articles and pages.

The Result

(Click images to enlarge)

It took three months to build the site, which was launched on schedule in May 2008.
Early results are promising: usage of the Global Commercial Gateway intranet has grown substantially, with users from all over the world accessing the site. Sign-ups to the fortnightly newsletter have also grown substantially. Positive feedback from community members continues to flow in.
We expect regular usage and engagement with the site to grow further: we are researching and publishing fresh internal news and content on an almost daily basis with the help of community members from around the world.